The US government has asked the federal court in Washington DC to skip a trial and go ahead and impose the $20,000 fine on Voices. No date has been set for a hearing yet, but we will be contacting Voices delegates and supporters to stand with us in Washington DC, where we will resist any penalty and continue our countersuit which declares that US sanctions on Iraq constituted crimes against humanity.

• Read the
  VITW Opposition to Government Motion for Judgment on the Pleadings (pdf)

• View other documents for US v. Voices in the Wilderness
• Sign the petition to John Ashcroft and the Department of Justice
• Read More About the Summons Voices Received

Mike Ferner
Voices in The Wilderness

BAGHDAD - If a “rogue nation” or swarthy men with foreign accents did it, we know what we’d call it. What the world’s most powerful military did to the village of Abou Siffa must be called the same thing: terrorism.

A small citrus grove was the last stop on our tour of this farming hamlet on the Tigris River, 30 miles north of Baghdad and Mohammed Al Taai wanted to give us a gift of fruit. I put the two oranges he gave me in my right coat pocket. In the left clinked two spent shell casings I’d just found on the ground that came from a 25mm gun mounted on a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. We listened to the story of how the U.S. military came to Abou Siffa three times in one month, leaving a terrorized community in its wake.

“On December 16, at 2:00 am, on a rainy night, all the houses in this village, about two dozen, were surrounded by U.S. troops in tanks and humvees. They surrounded the fields of the farmers by tanks and they destroyed the fences of the fields,” Mohammed tells the six people from Christian Peacemaker Teams who have come to document detainees’ stories.