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Army hears anti-war Mellencamp but nixes Baez
05/02/2007 10:10 PM, Reuters
Rocker John Mellencamp and folk
singer Joan Baez are both vehemently against the war in Iraq,
but only one of them was permitted to perform for recovering
wounded U.S. soldiers last week.
Mellencamp has sung many anti-war tunes but left politics
out of his performance last week at Walter Reed Medical Center,
a concert he put together after learning of the poor living
conditions and bureaucratic delays soldiers experienced there.
He invited Baez to join him, but she said the Army told her
she was not welcome.
"Four days before the concert, I was not 'approved' by the
Army to take part," Baez said in a letter published in The
Washington Post on Wednesday.
A spokesman for Walter Reed did not return calls seeking
comment.
Baez said she has always advocated nonviolence and had
refused during the Vietnam conflict to sing for the forces then
because she felt it would have condoned a war that was ripping
apart the country.
"I realize now that I might have contributed to a better
welcome home for those soldiers fresh from Vietnam," Baez
wrote. "Maybe that's why I didn't hesitate to accept the
invitation to sing for those returning from Iraq and
Afghanistan."
In a CNN interview, Baez declined to speculate about why
the Army nixed her participation.
"I would assume that the bureaucracy in the Army is the
toughest in the world, I have no idea what was going on there,"
she said.
Baez is no stranger to Iraq war protests. But she told CNN
the Walter Reed concert would not have been an appropriate
venue for airing her view on the war.
"I was going to do only two songs, one with Mellencamp and
one by myself," she said. "It wasn't a huge platform for me to
be holding forth, it was just two songs."
In August 2005, Baez appeared alongside protester Cindy
Sheehan whose son was killed in the Iraq war and set up camp
near President George W. Bush's Crawford, Texas ranch seeking a
second meeting with him.
An attempt to reach a representative for Mellencamp was not
immediately successful.
Before the concert, Mellencamp told MSNBC News that the
concert was not about politics and he was "going down there and
showing support for these kids who really don't make any
policies and who basically are following orders."
(Additional reporting by JoAnne Allen)
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