On March 25, at the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on global threats with the five heads of intelligence agencies of the U.S. government, Senator Tom Cotton, accused on national TV a group I have worked with for over 20 years, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, of being funded by the Communist Party of China.
During the hearing CODEPINK activist Tighe Barry stood up following the presentation of the Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard’s lengthy statement about global threats to U.S. national security and yelled “Stop Funding Israel.”
This was because neither Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton and Vice Chair Mark Warner had mentioned Israel in their opening statement nor had Gabbard mentioned the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in her statement either.
Women of Code Pink protest yet another injustice and war promoted on Capitol Hill. [Source: thehill.com]
As Capitol police were taking Barry out of the hearing room, in the horrific style of the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s, Cotton maliciously said that Barry was a “CODEPINK lunatic that was funded by the Communist party of China.”
Cotton then said if anyone had something to say to do so.
Refusing to buckle or be intimidated by Cotton’s lies about the funding of CODEPINK, I stood up and yelled, “I’m a retired Army Colonel and former diplomat. I work with CODEPINK and it is not funded by Communist China.” I too was hauled out of the hearing room by Capitol police and arrested.
After I was taken out of the hearing room, Cotton libelously continued his McCarty lie,
The fact that Communist China funds CODEPINK, which interrupts a hearing about Israel illustrates Director Gabbard’s point that China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are working together in greater concert than they ever had before.
Tom Cotton [Source: nypost.com]
An arch war hawk who falsely claimed in campaign ads that he had earned a bronze star as a U.S. army Ramger, Senator Cotton clearly does not appreciate the responsibility he has in his one-month-old elevation to the chair of the Senate’s intelligence committee.
He does not seem to care that his untruthful statements in a U.S. Congressional hearing aired around the world can have immediate and dangerous consequences for those he lies about, their friends and family.
In today’s polarized political environment we know that the words of senior leaders can rile supporters into frenzies as we saw on January 6, 2021 with President Trump’s loyal supporters injuring many Capitol police and destroying parts of the nation’s capitol building in their attempt to stop the Presidential election proceedings.
CODEPINK members have been challenging in the U.S. Congress the war policies of five presidential administrations, beginning in 2001 with the Bush wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, long before Senator Cotton was elected as a U.S. Senator in 2014.
We have been in the U.S. Senate offices and halls twice as long as he has. We have nonviolently protested war policies of Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden and now Trump again.
After getting out of the Capitol Hill police station, a CODEPINK delegation went to Senator Cotton’s office in the Russell Senate Office building and made a compliant to this office staff.
We have also submitted a complaint to the Senate Ethics Committee for the untrue and libelous statements Senator Cotton made in the hearing.
The abduction and deportation of international students who joined protests of U.S. complicity in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, the scathing treatment of visitors who have wanted to enter our country and now the McCarthy intimidating tactics used by Senator Cotton in a Senate intelligence committee hearing must be called out and pushed back against.
And we must push back against U.S. Senators who receive funding from front groups for other countries: Senator Cotton has received $1,197,989 from the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to advocate for the Israeli government’s genocidal policies.