Reading of Bill Ayers' statement on Cheney Plaza

Several students staged a reading of Bill Ayers' statement, "Doublespeak at the University of Wyoming" this Friday. I happened to walk by, camera phone in hand.

Not all students wanted this event cancelled and are speaking up.

Doublespeak at the University of Wyoming

Doublespeak at the University of Wyoming
William Ayers, University of Illinois at Chicago

April 5, 2010 10:13 AM MDT

On March 30, 2010, officials at the University of Wyoming, citing “security threats” and “controversy,” canceled two talks I was invited to give in early April, one a public lecture entitled “Trudge Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action,” and the other, a talk to faculty and graduate students called “Teaching and Research in the Public Interest: Solidarity and Identity.” I’d been invited in August, 2009, but one week before I was to travel to Laramie, I was told I had been “disinvited.”

In February, as the University began to publicize my scheduled visit, a campaign to rescind the invitation was initiated on right-wing blogs, accelerating quickly to a wider space where a demonizing and dishonest narrative dominated all discussion. A wave of hateful messages and death threats hit the University, and was joined soon enough by a few political leaders and wealthy donors instructing officials in ominous tones to cancel my visit to the campus. On March 28 an administrator wrote to tell me that the University was receiving vicious e-mails and threatening letters, as well as promises of physical disruption were I to show up. This is becoming drearily familiar to me, as I’ll explain.

A particularly despicable note from Frank Smith who lives in Cheyenne and is active in the Wyoming Patriot Alliance, said, “Maybe someone could take him out and show him the Matthew Sheppard (sic) Commerative (sic) Fence and he could bless it or something.” He was referring to Matthew Shepard, the young gay man who was tortured and murdered in 1998, left to die tied to a storm fence outside Laramie.

Republican candidate for Governor Ron Micheli released a letter he’d sent to all members of the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees asking them to rescind the invitation. Matt Mead, another gubernatorial candidate, said through a press release that while he is a self-described “fervent believer in free speech and the free exchange of ideas,” that still allowing me to speak would be “reprehensible.” He concluded that I should have “no place lecturing our students.”

I sympathized with the University, and told the folks I was in touch with how sorry I was that all of this was happening to them. I also said that I thought it was a bit of a tempest in a tea pot, and that it would surely pass. Certainly no matter what a couple of thugs threatened to do, I said, I thought that Wyoming law enforcement could get me to the podium, and I would handle myself from there, as I do elsewhere. I said I thought we should stand together and refuse to accede to these kinds of pressures to demonize someone and suppress students’ right to freely engage in open dialogue. After all a public university is not the personal fiefdom or the political clubhouse of the governor, and donors are not permitted to call the shots when it comes to the content or conduct of academic matters. We should not allow ourselves to collapse in fear if a small mob gathers with torches at the gates. I wouldn’t force myself on the University, of course, but I felt that canceling would be terribly unfair to the faculty and students who had invited me, and would send a big message that bullying works. It would be another step down the slippery slope of giving up on the precious ideal of a free university in a free society.

No good. On March 30, 2010 the University posted an announcement of the cancellation of my visit with a long and rambling comment from President Tom Buchanan. He begins with the obligatory assertion that academic freedom is a core principle of the University, but quickly adds that “freedom requires a commensurate dose of responsibility.” We are charged to enact free speech and thought “in concert with mutual respect.”

Nothing that I did or said in this matter was disrespectful or irresponsible, and yet, in the absence of specific references, readers are led to imagine all kinds of offenses.
The announcement is punctuated with a deep defensiveness: anyone who thinks the University “caved in to external pressure,” Buchanan writes, would be “incorrect.” Anticipating what any casual observer would conclude, he builds a strained and somewhat desperate counter-narrative. Buchanan pleads that UW is “one of the few institutions remaining in today’s environment that garners the confidence of the public,” and that a speech by me would somehow undermine that confidence.

He concludes that “this episode illustrated an opportunity to hear and critically evaluate a variety of ideas thoughtfully, through open, reasoned, and civil debate, it also demonstrates that we must be mindful of the real consequences our actions and decisions have on others.” That’s some sentence, and while it’s impossible to know definitively what he’s referring to as the “episode” (it might be the public lecture itself, but then it could be the cancellation of the lecture, or even the barbarians at the gates threatening to burn the place down, or withhold funds, that would provide the opportunity to critically evaluate matters). It has an unmistakable Orwellian ring: we cancelled that lecture as an expression of our support for lectures! And it’s eerily similar to the classics: We destroyed that village in order to save it! Work will make you free! War is peace!

One of the truly weird qualities of the Buchanan statement is a hole in its center, the deafening silence concerning why the campaign against me was organized in the first place. The reason is familiar to me as noted: in the 1960’s I was a leader of the militant anti-war group, Students for a Democratic Society, and then a founder of the Weather Underground, an organization that carried out dramatic symbolic attacks against several monuments to war and racism, crossed lines of legality, of propriety, and perhaps even of common sense. And then during the 2008 presidential I was unwittingly and unwillingly thrust upon the stage because I had known—like thousands of others—Barack Obama in Chicago. The infamous charge that the candidate was “pallin' around with terrorists,” designed to injure Obama, also demonized me. I’ve been an educator and professor for decades, but the hard right has accelerated the lunacy against thousands of folks— activists and artists, academics and theorists, outspoken radical thinkers—and wherever possible mounted campaigns exactly like the one in Wyoming. Often university officials stand up on principle and resist the howling mob, as they did recently at St. Mary’s in California; sometimes—as at a student-run conference at the University of Pittsburgh in March—they compromise, restricting access to talks and surrounding a speaker with unwanted and unnecessary police protection; sometimes, as in this case, the university turns and runs. It’s a sad sight.

Of course I wasn’t invited to speak about any of this, and it’s unlikely any of it would have come up without the active campaigning and noisy thunder from the relatively tiny group that is the ultra-right.

I would have focused my talk on the unique characteristics of education in a democracy, an enterprise that rests on the twin pillars of enlightenment and liberation, knowledge and human freedom. Education engages dynamic questions of morality and ethics, identity and location, agency and action. We want to know more, to see more, to experience more in order to do more—to be more competent and powerful and capable in our projects and our pursuits, to be more astute and aware and wide-awake, more fully engaged in the world that we inherit, the world we are simultaneously destined to change.

To deny students the right to question the circumstances of their lives, and to wonder how they might be otherwise, is to deny democracy itself.

It’s reasonable to assume that education in a democracy is distinct from education under a dictatorship or a monarchy; surely school leaders in fascist Germany or Albania or Saudi Arabia or apartheid South Africa all agreed, for example, that students should behave well, stay away from drugs and crime, do their homework, study hard, and master the subject matters; they also graduated fine scientists and musicians and athletes, so none of those things differentiate a democratic education from any other.

What makes education in a democracy, at least theoretically, distinct is a commitment to a particularly precious and fragile ideal: every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, and creative force. Every human being is born free and equal in dignity and rights; each is endowed with reason and conscience, and deserves, then, a sense of solidarity, brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect. Democracy is geared toward participation and engagement, and that points to an educational system in which the fullest development of all is seen as the necessary condition for the full development of each, and conversely, that the fullest development of each is necessary for the full development of all.

In a vibrant and participatory democracy, we might conclude that whatever the wisest and most privileged parents want for their children is precisely the baseline and standard for what the wider community wants for all of its children. If children of privilege get to have small classes, abundant resources, and a curriculum based on opportunities to experiment and explore, ask questions and pursue answers to the furthest limit, if the Obama kids, for example, attend such a school, one where they also find a respected and unionized teacher corps, shouldn’t that be good enough for the kids in public schools everywhere? Any other ideal for our schools, in John Dewey’s words, “is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy.”

We want our students to be able to think for themselves, to make judgments based on evidence and argument, to develop minds of their own. We want them to ask fundamental questions—who in the world am I? How did I get here and where am I going? What in the world are my choices? How in the world shall I proceed?—and to pursue answers wherever they might take them. Our efforts focus not on the production of things so much as on the production of fully developed human beings who are capable of controlling and transforming their own lives, citizens who can participate fully in civic life.

Teaching in a democracy encourages students to develop initiative and imagination, the capacity to name the world, to identify the obstacles to their full humanity, and the courage to act upon whatever the known demands. Education in a democracy is always about opening doors and opening minds as students forge their own pathways into a wider world.

How do our schools at every level—K-16—measure up to the democratic ideal?

Much of what we call schooling forecloses or shuts down or walls off meaningful choice-making. Much of it is based on obedience and conformity, the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime. Much of it banishes the unpopular, squirms in the presence of the unorthodox, hides the unpleasant. There’s no space for skepticism, irreverence, or even doubt. While many long for an education that is transcendent and powerful, we find ourselves too-often locked in situations that reduce schooling to a kind of glorified clerking that passes along a curriculum of received wisdom and predigested and often false bits of information. This is a recipe for disaster in the long run.

Educators, students, and citizens must press for an education worthy of a democracy, including an end to sorting people into winners and losers through expensive standardized tests which act as pseudo-scientific forms of surveillance; an end to starving public schools—including public higher education—of needed resources and then blaming teachers for dismal outcomes; and an end to the rapidly accumulating “educational debt,” the resources due to communities historically segregated, under-funded and under-served. All children and youth in a democracy, regardless of economic circumstance, deserve full access to richly-resourced classrooms led by caring, qualified and generously compensated teachers.

We might try now to create open spaces in our schools and our various communities where we expect fresh and startling winds to blow, unaccustomed winds that are sure to electrify and confound and fascinate us. We begin by throwing open the windows. We declare that in this corner of this place—in this open space we are constructing together—people will begin to experience themselves as powerful authors of their own narratives, actors in their own dramas, the essential architects and creators of their own lives, participants in a dynamic and inter-connected community-in-the-making. Here they will discover a zillion ways to articulate their own desires and demands and questions. Here everyone will live in search of rather than in accordance with or in accommodation to. Here we will join one another and our democratic futures can be born.

A primary job of teachers and scholars and journalists, and a responsibility of all engaged citizens, is to challenge orthodoxy, dogma, and mindless complacency, to be skeptical of all authoritative claims, to interrogate and trouble the given and the taken-for-granted. The growth of knowledge, insight, and understanding depends on that kind of effort, and the inevitable clash of ideas that follows must be nourished and not crushed.

As campuses contract and constrain, the main victims becomes truth, honesty, integrity, curiosity, imagination, freedom itself. When college campuses fall silent, other victims include the high school history teacher on the west side of Chicago or in Laramie or Cheyenne, the English literature teacher in Detroit, or the math teacher in an Oakland middle school. They and countless others immediately get the message: be careful what you say; stay close to the official story; stick to the authorized text; keep quiet with your head covered.

In Brecht’s play Galileo the great astronomer set forth into a world dominated by a mighty church and an authoritarian power: “The cities are narrow and so are the brains,” he declared recklessly. Intoxicated with his own insights, Galileo found himself propelled toward revolution. Not only did his radical discoveries about the movement of the stars free them from the “crystal vault” that received truth insistently claimed fastened them to the sky, but his insights suggested something even more dangerous: that we, too, are embarked on a great voyage, that we are free and without the easy support that dogma provides. Here Galileo raised the stakes and risked taking on the establishment in the realm of its own authority, and it struck back fiercely. Forced to renounce his life’s work under the exquisite pressure of the Inquisition, he denounced what he knew to be true, and was welcomed back into the church and the ranks of the faithful, but exiled from humanity—by his own word. A former student confronted him in the street then: “Many on all sides followed you…believing that you stood, not only for a particular view of the movement of the stars, but even more for the liberty of teaching— in all fields. Not then for any particular thoughts, but for the right to think at all. Which is in dispute.”

This is surely in play today: the right to talk to whomever you please, the right to read and wonder, the right to pursue an argument into uncharted spaces, the right to challenge the state or the church and its orthodoxy in the public square. The right to think at all.

This is some of what I would have discussed in Wyoming, but that will not happen, at least not this week. Canceling this talk underlines the urgency of having multiple and far-ranging speeches, dialogue, and discussions at every level and throughout the public square.

(Article reprinted at the request of the author)

Wheatland schools remove anti-hate banners

More on this issue in the next few days. For now, please visit this site and sign the petition. Let the school board know that Wheatland is no place for hate.

- Meg Lanker, Editor

Me and Mr. Cheney: A history

Photo: Protesters assemble on Dick and Lynne Cheney Plaza before the dedication. Credit- Meg Lanker, The Underground

Me and Mr. Cheney: A history
Meg Lanker
Monday, September 28, 2009 2:56 PM MDT

It may have been excitement, but I want to believe it was solidarity. The two little boys raised their fists as I marched with the protesters past the University of Wyoming Lab School students on recess. One gap-toothed boy cheered wildly as Nancy Sindelar, a Laramie peace activist, shouted, “These are your rights, kids! It’s the First Amendment at work!”

I watched their eyes light up and the wheels begin to turn. We were more alive than any history book, any documentary, any slideshow. The enthusiasm and unease electrified the air as they pushed forward, crossing Prexy’s Pasture on their way to protest former Vice President Dick Cheney and his dreadfully, ironically-named Cheney International Center.

I marched in solidarity with them Sept. 10. I have marched in solidarity with them since 2003, as the crazy 48-hour deadline for the bombs to drop ticked away and the news anchors waited with baited breath. I knew this invasion was wrong in my inner core. I scrawled furiously in a notebook as the airstrike began on the Iraqi Presidential Palace March 19, 2003. The night vision with white puffs of smoke sanitized the carnage on the ground.

I remembered seeing similar images when the U.S. went into Iraq in 1990. I was in first grade at a small Catholic school in Ohio. My class wrote letters beginning with “Dear Soldier.” I still remembering wishing an unnamed soldier Merry Christmas and not quite understanding why.

Dick Cheney was around for Desert Storm as well – in fact, then-Secretary of Defense Cheney and General Norman Schwarzkopf oversaw the engineering and planning of Desert Storm. In 1990, Cheney said, "I do not believe the President requires any additional authorization from the Congress before committing US forces to achieve our objectives in the Gulf." An unnerving statement, considering what happened nearly 12 years later.

PBS’ Frontline oral history website devoted a section to the former vice president called “Cheney In His Own Words.” In 1991, Cheney gave his perspective on U.S. involvement in the Persian Gulf: “We're always going to have to be involved [in the Middle East]. Maybe it's part of our national character, you know we like to have these problems nice and neatly wrapped up, put a ribbon around it. You deploy a force, you win the war and the problem goes away and it doesn't work that way in the Middle East – it never has and isn't likely to in my lifetime.”

Even then, Cheney knew. He knew this would never end – only go quiet for a period.

A friend of mine from my stint in the Navy was deployed to a ship running support operations for the 2003 invasion. He said they were told on the ship that they would “just know” if they were going to war. Later that night, as most prepared to sleep, the ship’s PA system erupted with AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells” and the sounds of pilots firing up the engines of their jets. It was time, he said. He began singing the lyrics to “Hells Bells” on the phone with me – “I’m a rolling thunder, a pouring rain/I’m comin’ on like a hurricane/My lightning’s flashing across the sky/You’re only young but you’re gonna die!”

He called it the “most patriotic time of his life.” This was a year after the invasion began and they finally pulled back into port.

I felt sick.

I watched President George W. Bush land on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln May 1, a ship that had been out to sea for nearly a year and was now forced to sit off the coast of San Diego because of security concerns. The sailors were mocked by the sight of their home for several days. I saw the “Mission Accomplished” banner, the beaming sailors, and a flight-suit clad Bush as pure political theater and nothing else.

Where was Cheney?

As Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and said, “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” Cheney was nowhere in sight.

On July 2, 2003, when Bush famously said of the insurgency, “Bring ‘em on,” Cheney was still nowhere in sight.

Yet he took those messages to heart – even when the administration backed off both statements, claiming the notorious banner was “unclear” and letting the “bring ‘em on” blow over.

It also seems that Cheney was at his undisclosed location when Bush spoke of torture. On March 23, 2003, Bush said Iraqi soldiers were “welcoming” American troops, and were “surrendering gleefully, happily.” He emphasized to a cache of White House reporters, “They'll be treated well.”

Andrew Sullivan wrote in the Oct. 2009 edition of The Atlantic of Bush’s resounding condemnation of torture on June 26, 2003 on the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. This was roughly one year before the news broke of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In his speech, Bush said, “I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. I call on all nations to speak out against torture in all its forms and to make ending torture an essential part of their diplomacy.”

There was no mincing of words. According to the Bush administration – or at least Bush – Americans don’t torture.

But anyone who watched news coverage of the Abu Ghraib prison photos, the de-classification of CIA and internal memos urging Bush to declare Taliban and Iraqi insurgents as exempt from the Geneva Conventions, and finally, de-classification of internal documents detailing methods ranging from sexual abuse and threats to the use of power drills and loaded weapons in the “approved” interrogation methods – anyone who watched any coverage of these stories knows better, knows America has tortured.

And it was with this in mind, I watched Cheney transform over the years from a faintly sinister-looking boorish uncle to a chilling criminal organizer of torture at worst and a nefarious bully at best. He was a chief architect in a pre-emptive invasion to find weapons of mass destruction with faulty intelligence, to spread democracy like so much syphilis, and, as many of Cheney’s detractors allege, to secure a significant slice of the Iraqi oil reserves for U.S. corporate profit.

Cheney insisted in a landmark interview March 16, 2003 with the late Tim Russert that the Iraqi oil reserves “obviously, belong to the Iraqi people, need to be put to use by the Iraqi people for the Iraqi people and that will be one of our major objectives.”

In this interview, Cheney made statements that are tragically laughable in hindsight and disastrous in their lack of foresight. He claimed, “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”

Russert pushed him on this statement and asked, “If your analysis is not correct, and we’re not treated as liberators, but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties?”

Cheney replied, “Well, I don’t think it’s likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators… The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question that they want to the get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.”

Russert asked about costs of the proposed conflict, which analysts placed at $80 billion then, with a cost of $10 billion for each year of occupation. Cheney declined to elaborate on projected costs in the interview, only acknowledging “there are estimates out there.”

As of Sept. 23, 2009, the cost of the Iraq War was over $165 billion – nearly three times the cost of the war in Afghanistan. Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $912 billion on these two wars. Much of that money has gone to civilian firms contracted to rebuild Iraq. A principle firm is Cheney’s old haunt, Halliburton, and its subsidiaries.

Cheney headed up the energy development company Halliburton, which bills itself on its website as “one of the world’s largest providers of products and services to the energy industry.”

I wonder if Cheney remembers the speech he gave to the libertarian-leaning-conservative Cato Institute in 1998. The think-tank sponsors numerous symposiums and invited then-Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney to speak at a conference entitled “Collateral Damage: The Economic Cost of U.S. Foreign Policy.”

He delivered a speech on the topic of Defending Liberty in a Global Economy, expounding on the challenges of delivering adequate energy services to a war zone.

Cheney remarked, “The good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where one would not normally choose to go. But, we go where the business is.”

And, in 2003, the U.S. went where the business is – the second-largest oil reserve in the world, under the sands of Iraq. Also, in 2003, Halliburton was awarded billions of dollars of no-bid government contracts to rebuild the infrastructure of Iraq’s oil industry. Halliburton is also entangled with Blackwater USA, a private security firm under investigation for smuggling weapons into Iraq concealed in dog food bags and, in more serious allegations, of murdering Iraqi civilians for sport.

Since Halliburton held millions in government contracts even before the Iraq war, Cheney sold his Halliburton stock to avoid a conflict of interest as vice president, but retains a severance package and retirements benefits worth millions. These stock sales paid for most of the Cheney International Center.

Cheney and the black gold he holds so dear both share a common characteristic: Both can take the form of crude or refined. Whether it’s screaming, “Go fuck yourself!” at a fellow legislator on the House floor, to smirking “So?” at a reporter who, in 2008, points out two-thirds of Americans no longer think the fight in Iraq is worth it, Dick Cheney held the monopoly on evil in the Bush administration – so much so that I began to regard Bush as a puppet, a faux-martinet standing in as a mouthpiece for what Cheney had planned for America and Iraq.

And here we are. Two, then four, then six years crawled by as the body count on both sides rose and “Mission Accomplished” tasted not of victory but ashes. The war in Iraq appears to stagnate more and more as troops prepare to withdraw, and the forgotten conflict, Afghanistan, transforms into one step forward, two steps back.

As Cheney continually defended the actions of CIA interrogators who “may have” crossed the line on Fox News every time whispers of prosecution of the previous administration began, the University of Wyoming quietly prepared to dedicate the Cheney International Center.

A clichéd little birdie told me the dedication was prepared for Sept. 10 at 10:30 a.m. in front of the center on Dick and Lynne Cheney plaza. I confirmed the dedication with UW spokeswoman Jessica Lowell Aug. 30 and published the news on The Underground.

I knew I had to be there.

I wanted Cheney welcomed with the reminder that he sanctioned torture in the name of every American citizen. I wanted him to know that he could not buy honor. And I wanted him to know that not every Wyoming citizen claims him as a native son – never mind that he was actually born in Nebraska. A petty point, but Wyoming does have a tendency to disown those that dare move here from “back East” or, God forbid, California. Wyoming only claims a select few as its own.

I was also torn about protesting his visit. As the editor of The Underground, it is my job to remain objective when I report the news. I reported on his visit along with the opposition and planned protest to it, which thanks to several Laramie community members tipping off Mead Gruver of the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, garnered national attention via the AP wire story “Protests brew over Cheney International Center.”

As the enthusiasm over the protest brewed, I began to suspect I could no longer be objective. This was cemented by UW President Tom Buchanan’s opinion piece in the Casper Star-Tribune Sept. 6 “Tolerance, diversity cut many ways.” Buchanan said he had reviewed a list of those protesting the decision to name the center after Cheney and recognized many friends and colleagues on this list.

Buchanan wrote: “The list includes some good friends and colleagues who have previously admonished the UW administration to support greater diversity and increased tolerance for all views. So it is ironic that they show so little of it when confronted by a situation that challenges their own comfort zone.”

The lack of understanding by the UW administration and Buchanan was incomprehensible and wholly offensive. I immediately fired off a letter in response.

In my letter, published in the Tribune Sept. 9, I wrote: “The protest to this decision has nothing to do with intolerance of Cheney's views or of narrow-mindedness. This has everything to do with naming the center after a man who is suspected of sanctioning torture internationally and numerous violations of U.S. citizens' civil rights.”

It was in that moment any ideas of objectivity fell away. I believe every journalist will one day face a crisis of conscience on whether or not to remain objective manifested by a breakthrough of passion. Mine came that day.

The day of the event, I scrawled the number for the Wyoming ACLU in black Sharpie marker on the arms and hands of nearly 50 people. I marched with the protesters. I created the music mix they blared from a small stereo as we marched from 22nd and Willett Streets to Prexy’s Pasture. I gave comments to the media as a facilitator. I counted nearly double the AP’s estimate of 100 protesters.

And then I stood in the media area, signed in and filmed the event, recorded the speeches and took comments for this feature from protesters, Cheney supporters, Tom Buchanan, and Jessica Lowell.

When Cheney walked out, the protesters booed, supporters cheered, but I remained silent.

When Former U.S. Senator Al Simpson commented on Cheney’s patriotism, how easy it was to protest and how anyone can be a “bitcher,” I continued to remain silent so as to not compromise my recording.

And when Cheney began to speak, not more than 20 feet from where I stood, all of the epithets and all of the curses I wanted shout at him about eight years of lies, sanctioning torture, buying honor, and sending my friends to die in an unjust war strained against my lips. I remained silent.

I remained silent because there were so many others hoisting signs and yelling what I have wanted to say to the man since I watched the bombs drop in 2003. The throng of protesters remained, for the most part, polite during the speeches – although Simpson’s comments certainly rankled a few.

The colorful signs elevated above the crowd spoke volumes. Some referenced the donation and torture: “We don’t want your blood money!” “UW: High priced whore” and “My USA doesn’t torture.” There were also references to Buchanan’s opinion piece: “Tom Buchanan tolerates torture” and “If thinking torture is wrong makes me intolerant, then I’m gladly intolerant.”

There were signs from supporters as well, both thanking Cheney for his donation and encouraging him to run for president in 2012 – although protester Will Welch dressed as a grim reaper-esque Darth Vader from Star Wars and carried a sign encouraging Cheney to add Vader to the 2012 ticket.

The demonstrators protested the naming for varied reasons, but many referenced the idea that Cheney was buying a mark of distinction at UW’s expense.

Chip Rawlins, a UW graduate student and Wyoming native, felt Cheney was receiving an undeserved tribute. “I think it’s wrong to honor someone like this who has done such severe damage to the United States and its reputation,” he said.

Protester and UW student Tim Earl said, “I don’t think that the university should allow Dick Cheney to clean up his legacy at this campus with this money with that building.”

Another UW student, Ruth Briggs, came out in support of Cheney and was dressed in a T-shirt with the message “Nobody likes a liberal.” She said she came out to show Cheney that there are “youth who aren’t influenced by the young liberal mindset, and that there are young conservatives who support Mr. Cheney.”

Briggs added she feels liberals outnumber conservatives on the UW campus. Later, she was able to have her picture taken with Cheney and he mentioned that he liked her T-shirt.

UW graduate student Dan DePeyer echoed many of his fellow protester’s sentiments. DePeyer helped organize the protest, sending a bulletin out to the members of the Facebook group, “UW Students Against the Naming of the Cheney International Center” and helped create signs for the rally.

DePeyer said, “I believe Cheney is guilty of war crimes, particularly torture, and he’s responsible for many international crimes.”

UW alumnus Mara Sobotka also helped organize people to rally at the dedication and led the march to campus. She said, “I am here to demonstrate that we do not support what Dick Cheney stands for."

Not everyone at the protest was a UW student or Laramie resident. Mark and Renee Sandefer of Colorado drove up to protest the dedication. Mark said he wants to see both the war in Iraq and Afghanistan ended and called for Cheney’s prosecution on charges of murder and crimes against humanity.

Renee said that the UW administration had committed “an atrocity” by allowing a “war criminal and a war profiteer to come in here and buy himself this honor.” She called the dedication of the center a “disgrace to this university and to this nation.”

Other supporters of the former vice president were just as vocal in their defense of Cheney’s actions and policies as his detractors. UW students Dillon Kinney and Dustin Stallings came out to support Cheney.

“I strongly believe that what he did was the best thing for our country,” said Kinney. “I think it’s great that the university can dedicate this in his honor and recognize what he’s done for us.”

Buchanan did not address the demonstrators in his speech but afterwards called the crowd “well-behaved” and “civil the way we hoped it would be on a university campus.” He said, “Considering the emotions here, Wyoming did itself proud. I’m sure there are folks who feel strongly on both sides.”

UW spokeswoman Jessica Lowell said of the crowd, “You know, in America, we have the First Amendment which entitles everyone to free speech and they certainly got their opportunity to use their First Amendments rights.”

In the end, I decided to wait a few weeks before writing about this event. Buchanan was correct in his assessment of the emotions running through the crowd that day. When Cheney began his speech, the cheers and jeers threatened to reach a fever pitch. Even though I decided to wait, the memories I carried away from the event remain fresh.

I carried away the memory of those kids, staring frozen in astonishment or applauding and shouting as we marched by their recess time.

I also carried away the memory forever burned into my mind’s eye of Cheney striding out of the international center and thinking to myself with a bizarre jolt, “But he’s just small, stooped old man with a cane…”

And I carried away the memory of being within a few feet of Cheney and feeling an unearthly coldness crawling across my skin on an unseasonably warm day as I heard him laugh. His laugh was humorless and bitter, his face blank as I looked him in the eyes.

Making eye contact with Cheney, I understood the arrogance needed to explain away five draft deferments, courtesy of the University of Wyoming and Casper College, with the statement, “I had other priorities in the 60's than military service,” and then later calling Vietnam “a noble cause” in which “had I been drafted, I would have been happy to serve.”

I understood the dispassionate indifference needed to look at reporters and the American people and insist the intelligence was never faulty, the CIA interrogators never crossed the line and that Iraq is still the noble cause he believed Vietnam to be so many years ago.

I understood and was dismayed – I know he will never answer any questions truthfully in any kind of investigation. Cheney creates his own acerbic reality, in which he is the star and the rest of the proletariat purely bit players.

Never mind the U.S. soldiers sent to die in the desert.

Never mind the lives battered and broken by the detention of innocents.

Never mind the legacy of national debt he helped create.

Never mind the quagmire enveloping the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

Never mind the authorization of heinous threats and abuse as “enhanced” interrogation methods.

Never mind any of this because he gave the university so many millions made the good ol’ capitalist way – war profiteering. Perhaps the business school should have been named after him, with lessons in no-bid contracts and off-shore accounts. After all, Cheney was a rather successful capitalist.

Furthermore, none of this will ever fit into Cheney’s version of events. The protesters and the media were simply part of his routine. Sen. Simpson’s annoyance at the demonstrators provided a back-handed acknowledgment of the dissent. Cheney made no mention of the protesters in his speech, only smirking in their general direction a few times beforehand.

I tried to ask him a question afterwards and was pushed out of the way. My entire generation was pushed out of the way with the assistance of this man, so I should not be taken aback by his impassiveness.

Several of the protesters saw Cheney’s plane off at the airport here in Laramie. Accompanying them was a long, heavy list of names – names of soldiers killed in action since these disastrous wars began. They displayed the names prominently and flipped him the bird as the plane took off.

I know he saw.

But I doubt he cared.

Tea Parties and unity: Where were they?

Photo: Protesters at the 9/12 Rally in Washington D.C., organized by FreedomWorks Foundation, a conservative organization led by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey. Credit - www.huffingtonpost.com and the AP

Tea Parties and unity: Where were they?
Robert Roten
Sunday, September 13, 2009 12:46 PM MDT

Where were they?

The Wyoming 912 Coalition rally at Conwell Park in Casper yesterday was supposed to be about uniting the country and remembering the way it was united on 9/12/01, but it was really about divisiveness and about forgetting what happened on 9/12/01.

The rally was supposed to be about freedom, but it really wasn't about freedom at all. It was about giving up freedom and power, including the right to choose our health care, and giving that power instead to soulless corporations.

People carried signs that read, “Who gave unelected czars authority over us?” and “Freedom did not need change,” according to an article in the Casper Star-Tribune. The article quoted Casper resident Nancy Rinn as saying: “I think the people in Washington are stomping on the Constitution; they're trying to pass laws that are unconstitutional.”

Where were they, these tea party protesters, when George Bush and Dick Cheney were tearing up the constitution? Where were they when the government was listening in to their phone conversations with illegal wiretaps? Where were they when the government was reading their emails? Where were they when the government suspended habeas corpus and threw people into prison, “disappearing” them in the same way Josef Stalin used to make people vanish without a trace? Where were they when the United States government illegally tortured and killed prisoners of war?

Dave Kellett of Powell, president of the Wyoming 912 Coalition, reportedly said at the rally, “We were all Americans.” Kellett added, “There were no Republicans or Democrats, whites, blacks, Hispanics or Arabs,” on that day. The Arabs disagree with that, like the poor guy who was mistaken for an Arab (he was actually an Indian Sikh) and murdered by Americans in that spirit of unity that prevailed after 9/11. The Arabs were immediate suspects in the 9/11 attacks and anyone of Arab descent, or anybody with dark skin who looked like an Arab, was in for a tough time after the attacks. Arabs in America are still not above suspicion.

Just ask Cat Stevens about that supposed post-9/11 unity of Americans. They wouldn't even let the “Peace Train” singer back in the country. Judging by what I saw on TV of the crowd in Casper yesterday, there weren't a lot of blacks, Hispanics or Arabs among the tea-party people there, or at the big march in Washington, either. It is pretty much a pure white, far right, Fox News-watching bunch. Dave Kellet's idea of national unity is not what I'd call “fair and balanced.”

That's not the only thing about the post-9/11 climate the tea party people seem to have forgotten. They forgot the nation was united behind their president, George Bush, despite the fact that 9/11 happened on his watch. They must have been watching Fox News back then when wingnuts like Bill O'Reilly were saying that anybody who criticized President Bush was a traitor, or words to that effect. Fox News and the rest of the right-leaning news establishment bullied anyone who dared criticize our beloved President George Bush, and they said he did nothing wrong. They still claim he was damned near perfect to this very day.

Where were these Tea Party people when the Bush Administration let the country down and failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks? After all, it was pretty spectacular failure that would seem impossible to top, but Bush managed to do just that, with Katrina and the Iraq War. Through all those disasters, all those deficits, all those illegal acts, all the loss of all those personal freedoms, the Tea Party people kept silent. Where were they?

So why all those anti-Obama signs at the Wyoming 912 Coalition rally? Where is that old spirit of unity? What happened to that unity where everybody stood behind the president and you were a called a traitor if you did not? Obama has only been in power a few months and has yet to initiate any disasters like the ones that Bush did on an almost monthly basis. On the basis of protecting the country alone, he's already 100 percent better than Bush was. How could they forget the unity of 912 on this occasion? How could they keep quiet when this nation was literally falling apart and only now, when the country is starting to get back on track, they suddenly want to protest their very own president?

Why? What has gotten them stirred up? Health care reform? They actually like the fact that their insurance company can drop them from coverage when they get sick? They like the fact that they have to stick with a job they don't like, or face losing their coverage or paying sky-high COBRA payments? Do they enjoy being jerked around by insurance companies that are not held accountable by anyone, including their own government? They ought to be protesting outside insurance companies, not protesting the guy who is trying to fix this mess. The Tea Party people act as if they are being directly paid by the health insurance industry to put a stop to health care reform.

The Wyoming 912 Coalition people are also very concerned about the federal budget deficit. They are afraid they will have to pay for health care reform with higher taxes, and that might be true, but where were they when the Reagan Administration and two Bush Administrations ran up deficits in the trillions? Where were they when the Bush Administration cut trillions of dollars of taxes on the wealthy, and started two wars at the same time? Where were they when the Bush Administration started a war in Iraq that would end up costing trillions of dollars, and paid for it with deficit spending?

The Tea Party people cheered when Rep. Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at President Obama, and they put that proudly on their signs, even though Wilson, not Obama, is the liar here. Where were they when President Bush lied about the reasons for going to war with Iraq? None of them had the courage to stand up and call President Bush a liar, even though he was. Fox News, the rest of the media and most of the American people just went along for the ride. Now they stand up, but what do they really stand for?

Now, after more than 4,000 soldiers were killed and trillions of dollars have been wasted in the Iraq war, now, they finally stand up for principles they completely abandoned for the past 20 years. Now, they stand up to avoid paying for the health care of poor people. That's not what you'd call noble, or Christian, or Muslim. They are willing to finance the death of hundreds of thousands of people and spend trillions of dollars for war without complaint, but they don't want to spend a nickel to pay for the health care of needy citizens of the United States of America, including those wounded fighting for this nation. Shame on them.

The tea party people weren't concerned when our soldiers died for nothing. They weren't concerned about a war that made this nation less secure, rather than more secure. They weren't concerned with the mounting deficits caused by deeply irresponsible government fiscal policies. They weren't concerned when the government did little to avert the Hurricane Katrina disaster and did less to alleviate the suffering of Americans afterward. The tea party people were silent then.

Now that the nation has been brought back from the brink of another Great Depression, thanks to government fiscal intervention, now that the United States is once again gaining some respect in the world for more rational foreign policies, after being a laughing stock and a pariah for the past eight years, now, the tea party people are protesting. They want to get rid of Obama and all he stands for. They want to return to the good old days of George W. Bush, the good old days of letting insurance companies decide who will live and who will die.

God help us all if they get what they are wishing for.

Robert Roten is a journalist with over 25 years of newspaper experience, including 20 years as a reporter, editor, photographer, columnist and editorialist at the Laramie Daily Boomerang. Since retiring from the Boomerang in 2000, Roten has been president of the Laramie Film Society and the Laramie Astronomical Society and Space Observers (LASSO). He has operated his own movie journalism web site, Laramie Movie Scope, for the past 13 years. He also has a weekly movie show, Laramie Movie Scope News, on KOCA radio in Laramie. He is also a member of the Online Film Critics Society and contributes frequent movie reviews to rottentomatoes.com. He is a former member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Society of Environmental Journalists. Roten is a resident of Laramie, Wyo.

Video of Dick Cheney's speech

Stay tuned for a news feature on the event, a behind the scenes look at the protest, and an opinion feature on the former vice president. For now, here's my filming of Dick and Lynne Cheney, plus the ribbon cutting.

Letter to the Editor: In defense of UW protest

Editor:

At the dedication of the Cheney International Center, former U.S. Senator Alan Simpson seemed to casually dismiss the 100 or so protesters present by saying, “It is easy to second-guess. It is easy to protest, takes no brains.”

I would like to remind Simpson that protest is what this great country is founded upon. Would he have said the same about those old white men who believed it was their “inalienable right” to speak their mind (with no brains) and oppose a tyrannical government? Was it easy for Martin Luther King to march on Washington or students at Kent State in Ohio to protest the Vietnam War?

I respectfully disagree with Simpson’s assessment. Every time someone stands up for what they believe in to those in power, they take a risk. Many of us who protested the Cheney International Center ceremony felt protesting was worth the possible risk of arrest or expulsion from UW.

It was incredible that someone who opposed Dick Cheney and his policies could stand next to someone who supported him without any violence or bloodshed. Sure, maybe today it is easier to protest in the United States, but in so many other countries this right is denied and severely suppressed by the government - we have only to look at recent events in China and Iran as examples.

What is “easy,” Senator Simpson, is for those in power to start unilateral wars, circumvent the Geneva Conventions, subvert the constitution, and authorize torture tactics that violate human rights treaties without any consequences. This is what takes “no brains.”

Dan DePeyer
University of Wyoming
Laramie, Wyo.

Editor's note: DePeyer is a University of Wyoming graduate student in the international studies program. He began the "UW Students Against the Cheney International Center" Facebook group and was instrumental in organizing the protest against the dedication Sept. 10.

States hold the solution to healthcare reform

Let the states run healthcare
Andrew Simons

As the healthcare debate evolves, one thing is becoming clear: Debate in this country is not what it used to be. With people caring guns and shouting down their elected officials, something needs to be done to elevate the debate beyond the yelling matches that are currently standard fare. A marketplace of ideas needs to be fair market – if it exists at all.

Some people have labeled demonstrators as “un-American.” I don’t share this thought. Anyone who is willing to carry a strong opinion is obviously a great patriot and a walking, talking advertisement for the First Amendment. The problem comes in when these people are more interested in making their opinion heard at the expense of drowning out any opposition. A debate requires both sides and a moment to rebut the arguments of the opposition. Though it’s not the law, I would argue that your right to free speech ends when it infringes on mine.

On top of all of this is the way that these town halls have headed south in terms of respect. The idea that any president, congressman or senator would allow for “death panels” in the home of the free and land of the brave is insulting, wrong and takes away from a real debate. Painting swastikas and hanging members of Congress in effigy adds nothing and intimidates the level-headed silent majority of people in this country who have probably been scared out of the debate. Their voices are now lost to us. Wyoming’s own congressman Cynthia Lummis recently said bringing arguments peaceably is a key part of the solution. In reality, the real solution has as much to do with bringing an intelligent argument as anything.

This also brings to mind recent incidents of people bringing guns to these town hall meetings and forums as a statement about the Second Amendment. I honestly don’t understand how this pertains to healthcare or contributes to support for Second Amendment rights, especially when held with signs proclaiming, “It’s time to water the tree of liberty.” This statement comes from Thomas Jefferson’s famous quote: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

If organizers of these protests knew the Founding Fathers at all, they would know that politically motivated executions were most likely not what they were intending. A personal meeting or town hall event is never something that requires a gun. Intimidating people into doing your will through violence calls elections and prospective legislation into further doubt, adding possible instability to what should always be a civil debate.

In general, the solution to the increasingly unruly town hall meetings and the healthcare reform problem is to leave much of the process up to the states. If these protests are in fact being organized by outside interests, it would make the job much more complicated. Organizing protests at town halls for thousands of state representatives would be infinitely harder than focusing on forums for 535 members of Congress.

Healthcare, is a regional and, yes, personal issue. Any solution is going to have incredible resistance. If the federal government and the Obama administration would settle for an absolute minimum of federal reform and provide federal dollars to the states to implement their own healthcare plans, solutions could be found that would serve the people of Wyoming as efficiently and confidently as Californians. As it stands, the federal government seems to believe both states have exactly the same concerns, but common sense says otherwise.

This chaos has led to a multitude of healthcare bills, plans and solutions posted on the websites of senators and representatives, proposed in their respective committees, and discussed in their respective town halls – each tailored to the wants and needs of each politician’s respective district. Wouldn’t it be grand if we could actually implement these plans? Wouldn’t that solution be easier than making liars of our congressmen after the plans that won voters’ support are then cut and pasted together into a bill that no one likes? This idea should lead to a state’s rights-based solution for healthcare.

Just think about it – a state’s rights argument that incredibly doesn’t involve guns, gay marriage or wolves in Wyoming. Wyoming could accomplish a suitable healthcare solution based on all the passionate support these previous issues have raised. A few level-headed organizers are a must – those who know to fact-check their statements and press releases would be crucial to running a campaign for Wyoming-centered healthcare, thereby avoiding the mistake one Wyoming advocacy group made by calling Governor Dave Freudenthal’s support of the Real ID Act “tyranny” for superseding state authority two weeks after he announced a state sovereignty resolution.

It’s people with good intentions and a lack of knowledge and restraint that will demolish this movement. A state-run healthcare system has the potential to streamline our government and create real solutions to the problems and concerns of people more accurately than anything put forth by politicians in Washington D.C.

Andrew Simons hosts Checks and Balances, a political talk show that airs Saturdays from 10-11 p.m. on 93.5 KOCA community radio in Laramie. Simons' political experience includes managing the special election of Wyoming State Rep. Jim Roscoe D-Pinedale in 2008, along with working on two presidential campaigns and the campaign of a U.S. House candidate.