Posted on 12/07/2006 8:30:17 PM PST by kristinn
NEW YORK -- John Kerry's sister, an employee of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, testified Thursday that she canceled a meeting with a group of women last March after she saw peace activist Cindy Sheehan and news media with them.
The former Democratic presidential candidate's sister, Peggy Kerry, said she went outside and saw about 100 women, including Sheehan, and "a gaggle of press." She said she went back inside the mission.
"I was angry that they had not told me Cindy Sheehan would be there," Kerry said. "It (her presence) explained to me why there was a gaggle of press outside."
The women, organized by a group called Global Exchange, said they wanted to deliver an anti-war petition with 70,000-plus signatures.
The protesters had expected to give their petition to Kerry. When she refused to meet with the women, they said they would remain outside the mission until someone from inside accepted the petition.
Police arrested four of the women, including Sheehan, after they sat in front of the mission and ignored orders to leave.
Kerry was testifying in Manhattan Criminal Court, where the four are on trial on charges of disorderly conduct, obstructing government administration, trespass and resisting arrest. Each faces up to a year in jail if convicted.
The defendants are Sheehan, 49, of Vacaville, Calif.; Melissa Beattie, 57, of New York City; Susan "Medea" Benjamin, 54, of San Francisco; and Patricia Ackerman, 48, of Nyack, N.Y.
Sheehan lost her 24-year-old son, Army Spec. Casey Sheehan, in Iraq on April 4, 2004. She became an energetic opponent of the war in Iraq, gaining international fame when she and others camped outside President Bush's 1,600-acre ranch near Crawford, Texas.
Defense lawyers said the women, part of an antiwar campaign called Women Say No to War, did nothing illegal. They said the women had a right to take a petition to the mission and had a right to be on the public plaza in front of the building where they were arrested.
Kerry, the mission's liaison for nongovernmental organizations, said she had arranged with Ackerman, a reverend, to meet at noon on March 6, but she said she later felt she had been misled about the meeting's purpose.
Sheehan's lawyer, Robert Gottlieb, asked Kerry about her refusal to talk to the women, noting that she had accepted a similar petition a year earlier.
"You didn't want to deal with the press, is that right?" Gottlieb asked.
"Because it's not my job to deal with the press," Kerry answered during a loud, hostile exchange with the lawyer.
She added that before returning to the mission she told the women she would speak with them but not with reporters.
Gottlieb suggested that the publicity that would result from Sheehan's presence caused Kerry's change of mind about the meeting.
Kerry replied loudly: "I said I was angry at the fact that Reverend Ackerman did not tell me in good faith who was going to be at the meeting and I thought that as a minister that was hardly the thing."
Kerry's manager, Richard Grenell, the director of communications, testified after Kerry that he agreed to accept the women's petition and speak to some of them in his office, but "I wasn't going to do it in front of the media cameras."
Too bad there are so many freaks like Medea and Sheehan in it...
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Kerry who ?
She was going to meet them but then she changed her mine.
Sort of runs in the family.
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