I also knew Kyrsten Sinema as a person who was against the police state and against police brutality, but all of her campaign signs say she is supported by the police.
So I suspect that Kyrsten Sinema wants it both ways on the issue of the police. She claims to be against the police state, but she seem to be willing to say anything to get the police vote.
Sinema criticized for Afghanistan stances
Rebekah L. Sanders, of The Arizona Republic's politics team, filed this post:
Democrats running in Congressional District 9 continue to sling arrows at each other after escalating their attacks earlier this week.
The latest argument is that former state Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (top) is flip-flopping on whether the United States should have deployed military force in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The criticism comes from Sinema's opponent Andrei Cherny, former chair of the Arizona Democratic Party (bottom). Cherny this week caught flak from Sinema and state Sen. David Schapira, the third Democrat in the race, over negative mailers Cherny sent in a California primary race a decade ago.
Cherny's campaign says Sinema is lying about her support of a military response in Afghanistan against Osama bin Laden, putting Sinema "far outside the mainstream of the Democratic Party." Sinema's campaign calls the criticism "trash talk" and says she would have voted for the joint resolution of force but draws a distinction between "military action" and "war."
Sinema was an active anti-war activist for several years and an organizer for the Arizona Alliance for Peaceful Justice starting at least by October 2001, according to Arizona Republic stories and a letter to the editor written by Sinema. The group formed after the Sept. 11 attacks to encourage humanitarian, legal and diplomatic approaches to terrorism and oppression. Its mission statement, http://www.azpeace.org/whow...>then and now, includes that "military action is an inappropriate response to terrorism."
No news stories quote Sinema directly opposing a military response in Afghanistan. But The Hill newspaper in Washington, D.C., this week reported that it obtained "internal communications from AAPJ and related groups" showing "Sinema spent the first few years after 9/11 as a passionate and vocal advocate for a nonviolent response to the terrorist attacks and an opponent of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."
The Hill said Sinema posted on an online forum in 2006 that she was “one of the core organizers against the war from day one (September 12, 2011), I have always and will always continue to oppose war in all its forms."
This year, Sinema's candidate questionaire for the Progressive Democrats of America, which Cherny did not fill out, said she "led efforts opposing these wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) before they even started."
Sinema told The Hill she quit the AAPJ because its views became too extreme. She said her own views have evolved and military force is sometimes warranted. And she added she would have voted for the authorization of military force in Afghanistan passed by Congress shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, but that war and military intervention are different.
An e-mail to supporters from Sinema's campaign Thursday repeated her argument.
"Sinema supported military action against al-Qaida, and continues to do so. Sinema was against going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Invading a country and mounting a military attack on a terrorist group are not the same thing," it read. "For example, U.S. Navy Seals successfully attacked Osama bin Laden without invading and occupying the nation of Pakistan."
Cherny's campaign called that an "impossible position" for Sinema, saying "a 'core organizer' against the war on Sept. 12, 2001, would not have voted to go to war on Sept. 14, 2001." The campaign e-mail to supporters added that only one out of 535 members of Congress voted against going to war in Afghanistan.
Follow Rebekah on Twitter at @RebekahLSanders.