Cindy Sheehan, a prominent anti-war activist whose son was killed in the Iraq War, recently said on her Facebook page that the IRS is demanding over $100,000 in taxes from her.

Cindy Sheehan
(photo by Jacob Appelbaum)

“I just got a notice from the IRS that I owe them 104 grand and they are going to levy my bank accounts and property,” she wrote. “I don’t have any property and there’s less than 150.00 in my bank accounts. Looks like Fed Prison is in my future. I would rather go to prison than fund the crimes of this government. I am going to send them a notice that they owe me infinity dollars for killing my son.”

Sheehan has been an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq, and was one of the founders of Gold Star Families for Peace after her son Casey was killed in action in Iraq in 2004. The following year, she set up Camp Casey across the road from President George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, demanding a face-to-face meeting with him to discuss her concerns about the war.

More recently she has protested against President Obama’s continuation of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and his Nobel Peace Prize.

On her blog, Sheehan described how she had decided to stop paying taxes to fund the wars. "After I made this decision to become a tax resister (as an unemployed peace activist using her son’s rapidly diminishing life insurance money to fund her activism), I became very well known and desired on the college circuit and Simon and Schuster gave me an advance to write a book about my exploits," she wrote. "Still, most of the money I made for these services (minus living expenses and helping my children through tough times and school) went back into the movement. I never charged peace groups a stipend or for travel in those early years, and I traveled all over to receive many awards, which were really just an opportunity for groups to raise money most of the time. I didn’t care—I had money and money wasn’t important to me. Ending the wars was."

She compared her tax situation to that of General Electric and other large multinational corporations and noted that she was being asked to pay more in taxes than GE.