by Greg Rollins
Christian Peacemaker Teams

There is a gap in my memory that feels like it is a year, but is less than a second long. It stems from the thought of when will David and Mabel get here, “to what was that explosion?” The explosion shook me, made my ears ring and made time unstable. I turned around and twenty meters away a wall of dust enveloped the street. The dust dispersed quickly. In the middle of the road where someone placed the explosive device, the concrete medium lay burst.

By Peggy Gish
August 28, 2004

After navigating two checkpoint searches and three concrete walls, My CPT teammate and I entered a U.S. Military Base on the edge of Baghdad, a fortified island of U.S. soldiers.

“Where’ya from?” was the most common question we heard. One soldier came up to us with a big grin saying, “Hey, real Americans here!” Feeling cut off from their families and “real” lives, they welcome some diversion or reminders of family and home. We saw soldiers joking around with Iraqi workers and treating Iraqis politely who come to talk to get information or register a complaint.

Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?

By STAN GOFF

These milestones come along, reminding us and the wrath struggles to break free again. The anger is never really absent, just dormant like a sleeping volcano.

Back when the pack of professional liars in Washington DC and their slavish corporate press still had Americans brainwashed that Iraq was a threat to the United States, General Tommy Franks–then the chief military planner of the catastrophe in Iraq–said, “We don’t do body counts.”

He didn’t want anyone to know what might be behind the numbers.

I could say the same thing now, as we arrive almost simultaneously at 1,000 US military fatalities in Iraq and the third anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001.

So I’m saying it. This is not a body count. This is not about the number of dead GIs. This is not about almost 7,000 wounded. It’s not about 14,000 dead Iraqis, or any of the considerable inventory of macabre enumerations we might clinically extract from the orgy of cruelty that is now Iraq.

We won’t do body counts. War is more than a number. This war is an expanding ocean of unanswered pain, and it cannot be reduced to a number.

One thousand times now, people have arrived home or looked out the front door only to see a military sedan, with two troops in their dress uniforms.

Upon her return to Italy Simona Torretta said she planned to return to Baghdad. She said “I would do it all over again with all the consequences that carries even though I’m sorry for all the suffering my mother went through and didn’t deserve.”

Democracy Now! interviewed Jeff Guntzel.

Jeff Guntzel, a staff reporter for the National Catholic Reporter. He has been to Iraq 9 times since 1998. For years, he was a co-coordinator of Voices in the Wilderness. He has known Simona Torretta for 5 years.

Listen to the interview visit Democracy Now! Or read the transcript below.

All four of the Bridges to Baghdad colleagues were released today. Following is a brief report with a few details. While the report below mentions only the two Italian women, Reuters has reported that the two Iraqi citizens were also released.

While we are celebrating the safe release of our colleagues, we are also resisting the continued occupation of Iraq–and preparing for the escalation of US military action that is now taking place and will likely intensify after the US elections on November 2.

Sincerely
Voices in the Wilderness

Sept. 28 (Bloomberg) — Two Italian aid workers held hostages in Iraq have been freed and are in good health, Prime Minister Berlusconi said in a televised press conference.