The Million Vets March had to be done to let President Obama know his efforts to block all Americans, including veterans, from America’s national parks and memorials would not be tolerated and that veterans themselves are willing to fight to keep them open, according to the thousand-member strong Special Operations Speaks.
The group is also incensed that CNN characterized the march as a Tea Party event and used one Confederate flag and one controversial comment to define the march.
The issue of veterans’ access to memorials arose on the very first day of the partial government shutdown. An Honor Flight of World War II veterans from Mississippi were blocked from seeing the World War II Memorial by the National Park Service (NPS). Barricades were placed in strategic locations and NPS rangers were stationed at key points to block entry, even though no such security measures are in place at open-air memorials during normal government operations.
Similar confrontations followed and veterans were physically removed from other memorials along the National Mall. As a result, organizers declared Sunday as the Million Vets March as an act of civil disobedience to reopen the memorials.
“We had to stare down the president. The President of the United States, for the past five years, really not treated veterans any good, going back to the 2009 (Department of Homeland Security) report where it called returning veterans potential terror threats to trying to take their guns away if they go to see a doctor,” said Special Operations Speaks Political Director Larry Ward. “It was a bad start and it’s gotten worse and worse. To use the government slimdown as a means to punish the American people, to inflict maximum pain, is deplorable. To do so to our American veterans, to our World War II vets is absolutely unacceptable.”
The political debate over government funding and whether and how to raise the debt ceiling have both sides pointing the finger of blame across the political aisle. Ward says his group would spread the blame around it it was warranted, but he says President Obama and the Democrats are responsible for the memorials being shuttered.
“We would have been focusing on the Republicans and the Democrats had the House of Representatives not passed a bill to open all the parks. And the president, what he did was he signed a veto threat for any bill that came to his desk that reopened the parks,” said Ward.
That being said, Ward says the group makes no secret that there is a political element to their involvement in the march and criticism of the president.
“It is a political fight. There’s no question it’s a political fight. The President of the United States is using our veterans as political pawns. We had to make a statement and tell him that’s unacceptable. So we didn’t start the political fight but we stood up for it and we’re going to continue to stand up for it. Those barricades are going to continue to be taken down across the country and our veterans are going to get access to the memorials without having to ask permission from a park ranger to enter,” said Ward.
Ward says crowds started to gather around 7 a.m. Sunday morning and a little more than an hour later the barricades started coming down. He says the vast majority of the people on hand were veterans but they were joined by conservative politicians like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as well as the Tea Party Patriots and Tea Party Express.
After the barricades were removed, a group of veterans carried them a short distance to the southern fence of the White House. Ward says that was a powerful moment.
“This is, in my opinion, one of the most historic and captivating moments in our nation’s history, when our veterans took the initiative (through) civil disobedience brought these barricades, dropped them on Obama’s doorstep. One of them had a sign on it that said, ‘Return to Sender.’ It was a fantastic moment in our history and it made me very proud of these folks who stood up,” said Ward.
It was near the White House that veterans encountered city police forces dressed in riot gear. Ward was not a witness to the confrontation but he says there is plenty of video that will show the veterans acted peacefully and lawfully and the police instigated the tension.
Special Operations Speaks is also lashing out at CNN for what it considers deliberately false reporting on the event, even issuing an open letter in criticism of the coverage. A CNN.com report gave considerable attention to the one Confederate flag at the event and to one speaker, Larry Klayman, who asserted on multiple occasions that President Obama is a practicing Muslim. Ward says to allow those incidents to represent the event and the message is a clear-cut case of journalistic malpractice.
“What CNN tried to do was to mute the national enthusiasm for this event by picking out these one or two isolated incidents and also by trying to say that it was a Tea Party event. Of course, the left has done such a great job of demonizing the Tea Party, not that we’re distancing ourselves from the Tea Party,” said Ward, noting that not a single liberal organization or elected official showed up to support the veterans.
“The make-up of the crowd was 80-90 percent veterans. For them to call it a Tea Party event just because there were some Gadsden flags flying is ridiculous,” said Ward. “I pointed out in the letter that calling it a Tea Party event just because the Tea Party showed is akin to calling CNN a communist news network just because their reporters are so far left-leaning.”
Ward also vows that we haven’t heard the last of efforts to help veterans gain access to their memorials.
“It’s not going to stop. I’ve heard of a number of individual local protests that are going to go out and continue to cut those wires, continue to practice civil disobedience. We are in the era now of civil disobedience and it will not stop. We will peacefully gather. We will peacefully make our protests, but we will not be obedient to these unconstitutional, deplorable acts of barricading our veterans outside of their memorials that are there to honor them,” said Ward.
