The Dartmouth via U-Wire
August 14, 2003, Thursday
BYLINE: By Alison Schmauch

Hanover, N.H.

When Kathy Kelly first went to take toys and medicine to hospitalized Iraqi children, she met one little girl whose abdomen had literally been ripped open.

Another three-year-old boy, whose arms vaguely resembled dead tree branches, forlornly looked up at her and asked, “Will I always be this way?”

Kelly, a three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and a founding member of the anti-war organization Voices in the Wilderness, spoke at length Wednesday night about this experience and others like it during her stay in strife-ridden Iraq, which lasted six months.

August 13, 2003

Letter to Ashcroft and the Justice Department asking him to decline to ask the court for a civil judgment against Voices and to assert that economic sanctions were criminal and the shock and awe campaign was illegal, immoral, unjustifiable, unauthorized under international law and counterproductive.

• Read the letter to Ashcroft
  
• Sign the petition to Ashcroft
• Download the letter in PDF format

Contact: Tom Walsh: 773-784-8065
For Immediate Release

(Chicago, IL. Tuesday, August 12th….) On July 29th 2003 Voices in the Wilderness (ViTW) was presented with a summons by the United States Department of Justice, charging ViTW $20,000 in penalties, plus interest and late fees, for bringing medicine and school supplies to Iraq. ViTW has been given 20 days to respond or “judgment by default will be taken against you for the relief demanded in the complaint”.

Since 1996 ViTW has been a campaign to end the US/UN sanctions on Iraq, calling their effect on the Iraqi people inhumane, immoral and unjust. ViTW does not intend to pay these fines. We do not believe that we have acted illegally by bringing desperately needed relief to the Iraqi people. Rather, our response to this summons will be an extension of our effort to draw attention to the devastating condition of life in Iraq and to the direct role that US/UN imposed sanctions and US bombing campaigns have had on ordinary Iraqi families and the civilian infrastructure.

Bangor Daily News (Maine)
August 12, 2003 Tuesday All Editions
SECTION: B; Pg. 4
BYLINE: AMANDA DUMOND

International activist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Kathy Kelly spoke on economic sanctions and the effects of war that she witnessed in Iraq at a press conference Monday morning. The event, sponsored by the Peace and Justice Center and the Bangor Chapter of Veterans for Peace, was held at the center.

Kelly, founder of Voices in the Wilderness, a national peace activists group, told Veterans for Peace members and local residents at the press conference that U.S. economic sanctions enabled the U.S. military to win the war easily over a weakened Iraqi populace.

“Democracy is based on information,” she said. “We lost crucial information on ordinary people like ourselves in Iraq” when the sanctions were enacted.