Christopher Allen-Docot

On the morning of Saturday January 17th Um Haider and Mostafa crossed the border of Jordan and entered into American military occupied Iraq. They were heading home, after 9 months in the US, to a “liberated” Iraq where people are afraid to be out after dark and American military helicopters buzz the skyline at low altitudes like giant mosquitoes carrying a venom (the weapons not the G.I.s) worse than malaria or the West Nile Virus. Um Haider would soon see that while much has changed in Iraq, too much remains the same and some of what has changed has done so for the worse.

Our journey back began on a difficult note as we missed our flight due to a combination of a snafu by the counter agents at the airport, being flagged for extra security screening, and then being sent to customs by a TSA officer concerned about the money we were carrying. The TSA officer was a courteous and young guy and he offered to escort us to Customs in an effort to expedite things so we wouldn’t miss the flight. While in Customs he told me he had recently returned from a tour of military duty in Iraq, in the same breath he noticed Mostafa’s hand and asked what had happened. I explained the story of the bombing of their Basra neighborhood in 1999 and how Mostafa lost part of his hand and his brother to the blast. The TSA officer didn’t respond immediately; but after a pause he related to mixed feelings of his participation in the war. His mind and gut were in conflict. He had pledged an oath to defend the American Constitution and to obey his chain of command but in so doing I suspect his gut was telling him he was doing something wrong. This young man now wrestles with the image of kids like Mostafa while those who made the decision to send him off protect themselves by distance and blindness.

Ed Kinane
Voices in The Wilderness
Syracuse, NY

Last spring I worked with the Iraq Peace Team in Baghdad. The US was invading then, and its bombardments were killing thousands � some within shouting distance of our hotel.

It seemed too then that, if I weren’t buried under tons of hotel rubble, my demise was most likely to come from the shattered and hurled glass of the hotel windows. I found myself dwelling on a verb that seemed � aptly or not — to capture the process: “eviserate.”

As it turned out, all of our team of about 25 survived. Our hotel, while routinely shaken, was never hit. In early April, however, a US tank shelled the hotel across the street from ours, killing international journalists. I didn’t see the shell hit, but moments later I saw flames consuming a corner of the building. News reports said the shell came from a US tank about a mile up river. It wouldn’t have taken much of a miscalculation for the shell to have hit us.

Ewa Jasiewicz
Occupation Watch
Occupied Amara 11/1/2004

It’s a bright-cold Tuesday morning in Amara and a man who’s too afraid to be named is talking to us frankly at a local kebab street caf. He’s a former Daawa party activist and current member of the Union of Political Prisoners, a nationwide group formed to pick up the pieces, collectively, of the lives and pasts of some of Iraq’s most obvious walking wounded. Regime-labelled as the enemies of Iraq; they were disfigured, thrown in acid, sliced open, stabbed with electric rods into involuntary limb flipping unconsciousness, stretched, torn, hammered and placed in rooms: dark rooms, dank rooms, rooms with floors turned black with freely and frequently spilt blood, rooms with hooks where a man would hang, broken shouldered in agony, rooms infested with cockroaches, rooms hidden underground unopened for decades, rooms locked behind urban underpasses, internees beaten daily in thick dank darkness to the sound of traffic streaming, the steady hum and sigh of cars passing by, life passing by to the daily corrosion and gnaw of being ignored, being so close to ordinary life but unable to see or touch it; and the insanity rooms, rooms painted red, bright red, with bright lights on every day, all day, for years.

After humanitarian trip, Sacks was ordered to pay $10,000

Published on Thursday, January 15, 2004
by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

A retired engineer is suing the U.S. government after being fined $10,000 for making a humanitarian trip to take medical supplies to Iraq.

Bertram Sacks, a 61-year-old Seattle resident who has made nine such trips since 1996, filed a 40-page lawsuit in U.S. District Court yesterday, alleging that the federal Office of Foreign Assets Control overstepped its authority, violated the U.S. Constitution and flouted international law when it penalized him for humanitarian missions.

Since Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the United States has imposed economic sanctions on that country that have slowed the delivery of food and medicine and had a “devastating humanitarian impact” on civilians there, Sacks’ lawsuit says.

15 January 2004
Dear Friends of Voices,

As we approach the eighth anniversary of the beginning of the Voices in the Wilderness campaign (this Monday, Martin Luther King day) we are very grateful to see the vast network of people that has grown to be a part of Voices in the Wilderness. We feel confident that if this network were to act together for justice on issues such as the one described in this email, our voices would be heard loud and strong.

PLEASE call your Senators and Representative today and ask that they urge the Security Detainee Review Board in Baghdad, Iraq, to swiftly examine the cases of the Palestinian students listed below and seek their immediate release. Kathy Kelly’s article explaining the details of this situation can be found here.